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What we offer

New media applications and services are revolutionising social interaction and user experience in wide ranging industry sectors. The rapid emergence of human and environment sensing technologies, novel immersive presentation devices and high performance, globally connected network and cloud infrastructures is generating huge opportunities for application providers, service provider and content providers. These new applications are driving the convergence across devices, clouds, networks and services, and the merging of industries, technology and society. Yet the developers of such systems face many challenges in understanding how to optimise their solutions (Quality of Service) to enhance user experience (Quality of Experience) and how their disruptive innovations can be introduced into the market with appropriate business models. A new multi-disciplinary collaborative approach to product and service innovation is needed that brings together users, technology and live events.

EXPERIMEDIA is a multi-venue experimentation service for research and development of novel Internet products and services aiming to deliver new forms of social interaction and user experience. EXPERIMEDIA provides customers with access to the resources necessary to study the relationship between Quality of Service and Quality of Experience.

Specifically EXPERIMEDIA offers:

Access to live events at venues with associated user communities

A flexible experimental software and service platform instrumented for experimentation and customisable for deployment at different venues

Showrooms to promote and market successful technologies in target markets.

The combination of live events, venues, user communities and an advanced technology platform accelerates product and service innovation by allowing companies to co-create solutions in real contexts with end-users. EXPERIMEDIA characterises live events as “any cooperative human activity that can be enhanced from access to real-time information delivered by the Internet”. Examples live events include:

A 1000 spectators attending a two day ski championship at a ski resort

An athlete participating in a one hour sports training session with a coach and sports scientist

A group 50 students attending a one hour interactive virtual reality presentation about ancient Greece

A small group of hikers on a day trip on a mountain, a round of golf or a trail run

Benefits of technology trials at live events

There are many benefits of using Live Events as the basis of trials and experimental studies bother socio-technical and economic . Each live event captures a distinct user experience to be enhanced along with providing temporal and spatial constraints associated the activity and its location, technical constraints associated with available infrastructure and socio-cultural constraints associated with the user communities being targeted. Dealing with contextual factors is a major challenge for experimenters aiming to develop generic solutions for Internet deployments and to understand how to address barriers to adoption of technology. In addition the ability of media technologies to connect people in real-time across distant locations can create new opportunities for interaction with live events.

Socio-Technical benefits that can be explored include

individual and community behaviours

scaling for large-scale short-lived communities

environment considering physical, social and ethical constraints

adaptation of content according to individual and/or group preferences

real-time orchestration allowing for adaptive narratives

unreliable sensors and devices for detection and tracking of feature points

device capabilities both remote and at a venue

cooperative or collaborative frameworks including dealing with selfish or malicious users

From an economic perspective, Live Events provide technology providers with access to an entry point to a potential market. This entry point can lead to both direct and indirect sales. There are two scenarios considered based on the service supply chain associated with the specific venue. Technology providers can “selling to venues” but working with a venue to enhance services that the venue then sells as part of their offering to visitors. The technology provider is aiming to sell directly to the venue and works collaboratively with them to develop a solution tailored for the venues needs. In addition, if successful, the venue offers a showroom for the technology which can be promoted globally based on the venues marketing network. This then leads to indirect sales as a result of the experiment results. An example of the “selling to venues” model is the CAR Smart Venue who perform RTD with technology providers to enhance their service offering. CAR want new ways to incorporate technology into training programmes that they can then sell as capability to international sports federations.

Another scenario “Selling to Visitors” is where the technology provider sells directly to visitors at the venue. Here the venue works with the technology provider to provide sector knowledge in delivering a service to the venue. The technology provider is aiming to sell directly to the visitors rather than through the venue. The venue would be interested in the service if it enhances user experience and has the potential to attract customers to the venue and create demand for other services. Schladming Smart Venue is an example of this model where technology providers aim to enter a complex ecosystem co-existing with multiple service providers delivering services to support a world class experience. Again if successful, Schladming can act as a technology showroom for technology providers aiming to promote solutions globally.